Historians as allies of the labor movement

By James Green, 4 December 2000

For several years now, we’ve been hearing about the shortcomings
of so-called public intellectuals. Their efforts are neither new nor
daring; they mistake the word for the deed; they are unable to bridge
the chasm between academe and the public and, therefore, they make
little impact on culture or politics.

For scholars like myself, who study labor history and seek to
influence the current union movement, the problem is especially
troubling. Many of us came of professional age in the 1960’s,
with the hope that we could affect public policy or build movements
for social justice. My own work was inspired by Progressive-era
historians who had large public audiences and made a significant
impact on the social-justice movements of their time. Mary Ritter
Beard held no academic position, but she wrote a fine popular history
of the labor movement, actively participated in the educational
efforts of the Women’s Trade Union League, and made intellectual
contributions to the women’s suffrage movement. Her spouse,
Charles A. Beard, the great historian of class conflict, also
contributed to worker education and shaped popular understanding of
how propertied interests limited the possibilities for democracy in
the United States.

One of the last Progressive historians who followed in Beard’s
footsteps was my graduate-school mentor, the Southern historian
C. Vann Woodward (whose study of the New South, The Strange Career of
Jim Crow, was called the Bible of the civil-rights movement by Martin
Luther King Jr.). Woodward encouraged us to read W.E.B. Du
Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with its classic “history of the
part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy
in America.” When I arrived at Yale in 1966, it was a time for
reading the previously unrecognized writings of Philip Sheldon Foner,
the prolific Marxist labor historian. It was also a period when we
joined in the New Left’s criticism of some of the Old
Left’s writers, for whom class struggle had defined just about
everything. We were attracted to the unorthodox Marxism of
E.P. Thompson and C.L.R. James, who understood class struggle and
class consciousness in more-subtle ways, and who wrote with grace
about the cultures of common people.

But by 1981, most of us had to agree with Herbert G. Gutman, a
pioneer of working-class history, who charged that our “new social
history” had failed to reach its intended audience. Not much
progress had been made by 1997, when the labor historian Leon Fink,
who had studied with Gutman in the 1960’s, commented on the
scene. In his book Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of
Democratic Commitment, Fink argued that no one of our generation has
accomplished what Progressive intellectuals like John Dewey achieved
as a public educator and philosopher. No professor of our time has
matched the influence of the economist John R. Commons, who not only
shaped labor policy, but also founded the “Wisconsin school” of
interpretation, which governed academic understanding of workers and
unions for several generations.

To be sure, none of the historians of my generation can compare our
contributions to those of historians like the Beards, Woodward, Du
Bois, or Thompson. But we can measure our efforts by more-modest
standards.

As some scholars in African-American studies have recently pointed
out, intellectuals can be active in supporting popular struggles in
many ways (even if they are not treated as stars in the media). The
Columbia University historian Manning Marable recently noted in The
Chronicle that activism among people of color has created
opportunities for academics. “Intellectuals don’t create
history,” he said. “They follow it.”

That is a good way to summarize what I have been doing in labor
studies and public history since 1976. And it suggests how
today’s scholars might think about their work as public
intellectuals.

In 1976, I spent the year in England lecturing at Warwick University
on labor history, and I became involved with activist historians in
the History Workshop movement. The first History Workshop had been
started by a disaffected Oxford tutor in the

1950’s, to provide classes for working people and to enable them
to write their own history. When I returned home and began teaching at
the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a public university with an
urban mission, I looked for a similar way to break out of the academic
isolation that I had found so stifling in the United States.

The books I wrote in the 1970’s were undertaken in the hope that
I could reach the working-class students and union activists I was
beginning to encounter in my classes. The Massachusetts History
Workshop, which two graduate students and I set up, focused on helping
working people stage events commemorating their past. The
labor-studies-degree program that I started in 1980 was designed to
attract adult trade unionists who wanted to become more effective
activists.

In two decades, I learned from those students that historical
narratives can do more than just redeem the memory of past struggles;
they can help people think of themselves as historical figures who,
like those who came before them, have crucial moral and political
choices to make. Sometimes, stories of the past provide hope,
sometimes guidance. They don’t provide anything as concrete as
solutions to current problems, but they do impart a sense of how tough
choices were made in the past, how history was shaped by human
intervention, how certain decisions explained what happened to the
labor movement, what went right—and wrong.

In my various efforts, I tried to emphasize historical moments when
the labor movement broke out of its institutional constraints and
embraced diversity and experimented with bold tactics: I talked, for
example, about the multiethnic, largely female work force that
paralyzed the 19th- century textile industry in Lawrence, Mass., with
a strike for “bread and roses.” But I also noted that the strike,
though led by radical unionists, was opposed by the American
Federation of Labor, and that it failed -- either to improve
conditions for workers or to revitalize the union movement.

In reaching out to trade-union members, I also encountered opposition
from some union officials. Like other New Left radicals who were
attempting to engage the labor movement, I found myself traveling a
rocky road. It was a toll road, manned by gatekeepers from powerful
labor organizations with conservative leaders. We found that it was
one thing to write an academic book with a sharply critical view of
union bureaucrats and frozen ideas for a leftist audience; it was
quite another matter to present radical history to a working-class
audience. Some local union officials in Massachusetts found my
teaching and writing far too critical of their organizations and
forerunners; a number of hostile encounters gave me firsthand
experience of the deep suspicion of academics and intellectuals among
union officials that goes back to Samuel Gompers’s crusade
against “utopians” and socialists in the ranks of his A.F.L.

Nevertheless, I did find allies in the union movement, particularly
among the trade unionists who came to our program as adult students.
Even in the discouraging Reagan years, when unions were attacked by
employers and Republican officials and weakened by their own
conservative leaders, my students shared with me a sense of urgency
about rebuilding and changing the labor movement. They seemed hungry
for history, wanted to recover a sense of a past when unions were part
of a vibrant campaign for social justice. And they wanted to re-
create that past in the present. They urged me to tell
“labor’s untold story” in public, to counter the negative
image of unions being promoted by many of their employers, the mass
media, and politicians.

And so I turned to newspaper editorials that applied history to
current problems, to television and radio interviews, museum exhibits
and public- library lectures, and more. As a public intellectual, I
was doing what I do best: being a writer and teacher of people’s
history. I came to see the work I do as a college professor as the
best medium for me to link up with labor activists. In the process, I
also came to realize the truth of an observation by the British writer
and critic John Berger: that the passion for history is most intense,
not in the university, but in popular movements for struggle and
survival.

Back then, in the 1980’s, I could not imagine that many of the
union insurgents with whom I made common cause would one day lead
large unions in Massachusetts and, even, hold high positions in a
newly reformed national A.F.L.-C.I.O.

Nor could I imagine that I would be asked by one of those national
leaders to write a new short history for

A.F.L.- C.I.O. members -- a history that would replace the old
uncritical, celebratory pamphlet that scarcely mentioned women and
workers of color, or the ways that those people had been excluded from
unions. Democracy@Work, which will be published in the fall, provides
union members traditions from their past that offer hope and
encouragement, as well lessons about what went wrong in the past.

The changes in the labor movement have, not surprisingly, created a
new will among labor historians to overcome the pessimism that
overtook many intellectuals after the Reagan revolution in
politics. Witness the efforts of historians like Nelson Lichtenstein
and Steven Fraser to create a new alliance between students and
workers, which culminated in the formation of a national association
Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice—in 1996.

As is usually the case with intellectuals, ideological debate marks
such efforts. The sharpest argument pits those who call for a
class-conscious politics * uniting working people around common
concerns * against others who embrace a multifaceted identity politics
that recognizes the way in which divisions among workers have negated
class solidarity.

Those who seek to build a stronger labor movement based on economic
interest and class identity call for shifting from what some call the
“victim studies” of particular groups. They want to revive the
study of what the sociologist Todd Gitlin terms “the common
dreams” that once united labor and liberal campaigns to end poverty
and expand democracy. Others, like the historian Robin D.G. Kelley,
argue that union organizers need to pay attention to culture and
identities based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and gender. Only
that way, Kelley believes, can labor be at the center of a diverse
movement for social justice.

That debate is of great importance to those of us who teach working-
class history to trade unionists. In my own work, I have placed the
struggles of working people within a larger narrative of the expansion
of democracy. However, I have also had to come to grips with recent
historical scholarship that seems to cast a shadow on any picture of
unity. In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class, for example, David R. Roediger has shown how much
racial distinctions were at the center of white working-class
consciousness.

Similarly, the essays in the collection Work Engendered: Toward a New
History of American Labor, edited by Ava Baron, show how male
constructions of the terms “solidarity” and “democracy”
subordinated female workers.

In my classes with trade unionists, I have asked students to explore
the causes and consequences of such exclusionary practices within the
labor movement. I have found that discussions that focus on these
issues in terms of current practices provoke sharp divisions; but
discussions of the past seem to help us open up the topic of who has
been excluded, and why. Many of my students including white males from
traditional union backgrounds -- have been willing to read the
historical record objectively and to learn from past mistakes. But the
balance is a delicate one, particularly with women and members of
minority groups, who sometimes find their faith in the movement shaken
by the “horror stories” from the past.

The field of labor history, as well, has been shaken by the new
scholarship on difference. Studies of deeply ingrained sexist and
racist identities among white male workers seem to negate the very
notion of a class-conscious labor movement and to cast a pall over a
field that has suffered from pessimistic predictions of labor’s
future and declining class enrollments.

Recently, however, scholars like Roediger have begun to argue that a
more inclusive working-class studies can revitalize the field. Two
years ago, some of those scholars created a new group—the Labor
and Working- Class History Association, led by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
Joe William Trotter Jr., and Vicki Ruiz, whose own research has
focused on women and people of color. The organization aims to expand
the field of labor history to include the lives of those who have been
excluded from unions. It is also dedicated to forging a new alliance
between intellectuals and union activists, based partly on a more
critical understanding of the past.

The debate over the politics of identity has also surfaced, with its
own variations, among the people who offer courses to workers and
members of trade unions. Until very recently, that group viewed labor
historians as too academic to be useful in their courses. When I
became a member of the University and College Labor Education
Association in 1980, it had one division for university- based
teachers and another for union-based teachers. Each harbored
suspicions of the other; neither was much interested in critical
perspectives on the labor movement; neither used the scholarship of
labor historians in their classes for opening up questions about how
unions evolved. All that began to change in the 1990’s, and was
greatly accelerated by the reform of the national A.F.L.- C.I.O.

Last spring, I attended a meeting in Milwaukee where the old
bifurcated labor educators’ association was dissolved and a new
organization, the United Association for Labor Education, was
born. The conference centered on the impact of globalization and the
issues raised by the vast population of immigrants who now work in the
United States. In the past, none of the few labor-history sessions
offered attracted much interest. This year was different. What I and
the A.F.L.-C.I.O. education director, Susan Washington, had planned
as a small workshop on integrating labor history into labor education
ended up attracting some 75 people.

It is, indeed, an exciting time to be a labor historian. Scholars who
once felt isolated in university history departments are organizing
teach-ins on labor issues and supporting the new student movements
against sweatshops and for the promotion of living-wage standards.
Discarding older suspicions of intellectuals, the present A.F.L.-
C.I.O. leaders have welcomed scholars and students, and they joined
environmental activists in demonstrations in Seattle and Washington
against the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund.
For those of us who teach labor history, it is a particularly
important time to bring decades of scholarship on working people to
the subjects of our studies.

For the first time since the Progressive era of the early
1900’s, historians and intellectuals are being invited to be
allies of unions and workers. A century ago, public intellectuals who
participated in building progressive social movements did so, for the
most part, outside the academy. Our generation of socially conscious
scholars need not leave academe in order to reach out to others who
are trying to build new movements for social justice and economic
equity. As we try to revive the Progressive tradition of intellectual
activism, let us remember what the social movements of our time need
most from us: what we have to contribute as teachers and scholars.

[The article is drawn from James Green’s recently
published book “Taking History to Heart: The Power
of the Past in Building Social Movements”
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.)]

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